‘The high street we once knew as predictable and boring is destined to become something worse: deserted, boarded up and jobless.’
Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Guardian

Growing up in Liverpool in the 1970s, I remember a time when you couldn’t get a decent cup of coffee anywhere. This was very troubling for me, a wannabe French surrealist shacked up in gloomy Garston. Those surrealists used to drink a lot of coffee. They liked to talk and hang out in cafes. And with all that caffeine inside them, afterwards they liked to walk the city streets. In those streets, they said, you could discover novelty and chance encounter. That’s the meaning of life in the city, they said, novelty.

A bit later, I read Jane Jacobs. She wrote a great book in the early 1960s called The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs drank more gin than coffee. She particularly liked her local – New York’s White Horse Tavern, on the same Greenwich Village block she lived. Jacobs didn’t much like what planners had done to cities both sides of the Atlantic, nor what they were to mastermind. They peddled the silly idea that functional separation was the way forward, that spaces should have mono-uses – work here, residence there, leisure someplace else. Jacobs said this destroyed the mixed land uses and diversity that made neighbourhoods vibrant, that brought life to cities of all shapes and sizes. The city block that worked best, she said, was the block “with high-yield, middling-yield, low-yield, and no-yield enterprises”.

Decades on, weird things have happened to our cities. Since Margaret Thatcher’s day, we have not had much planning of the sort Jacobs dissed. The “free” market has decided things. And the free market soon discovered coffee. We have more places nowadays to drink coffee than the surrealist could ever have imagined. We know something’s up when Whitbread, the brewery group, started shutting its pubs and diversified into coffee, supplying us with a Costa on every street corner – or on every other street corner, next to every Co-op, with a Starbucks and Caffè Nero close by. The surrealists can get their caffeine rush. But where, afterwards, would they wander, for that novelty and fleeting delight?

Once the famine, lately the feast, an orgy of sameness. Steadily but surely, up and down the country, in that free market our big cites and little towns have become alike. Predictable chain stores dominate, too ubiquitous to mention. Yet now, amid the grumbles, chain giants have had enough, aren’t making enough. So they’re closing stores down in selected towns and cities. Marks & Spencer, as part of its “radical restructuring plan”, will close 100 stores by 2022, risking 2,000 jobs – House of Fraser is closing 31 stores with thousands more jobs on the line. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. The high street we once knew as predictable and boring is destined to become something worse: deserted, boarded-up and jobless. Our public spaces are sterile or else sterile wildernesses. What’s gone wrong? What can be done?

I’m old enough to blame it all on Thatcherism. Planning was bad, but no planning is worse. Though it’s not that there isn’t any planning; more our local authority planners seem to be bought off by those same big, rich chains.

New Look has debts of more than £1bn and has lost some of its credit insurance cover, which protects suppliers if a retailer goes bust. In the 10 months to Christmas, sales fell 11% and losses hit £123m. The company intends to close 60 stores and change its fashion ranges, but faces a struggle to win back young shoppers.

House of Fraser's Chinese owner, Sanpower, had to stump up £25m to see the store through Christmas and its debt is rated as junk. The retailer is attempting to reduce the size of its stores by 30% and has asked landlords to cut rents.

Debenhams, a 178-store chain that is more than 200 years old, is axing one in four of its managers and considering closures to cut costs. It has warned that profits have been hit by lower than expected sales, with profit margins also down as a result of having to cut prices to match rivals.

Photograph: Tony Margiocchi / Barcroft Images/Barcroft Media

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Meanwhile, honest planners haven’t been very imaginative. They need to read more French surrealism. And more Jane Jacobs. Nor has the free market been very free. Our cities these days are arenas for high-yields only, for gleaning land rent, for making property pay any way it can. People are priced off the land. Only rich companies can afford to stay put.

They monopolise and drive out smaller businesses. At the same time, they abandon areas not worth investing in. Rich people and rich companies see city real estate and central locations as ever more profitable financial investments. After they have driven away competitors, they rule. In the mix, there’s not much mix. And when they overextend, they downsize, leaving people with no alternative.

Marks And Spencer in Walsall, West Midlands, is among 100 stores destined to close. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Can’t central government empower local authorities to empower local, independent businesses? Real empowerment, I mean – empowerment of ideas. Many people, lacking money capital, have capital inside their heads awaiting realisation. That’s the alternative. That’s the opportunity. Cities and small towns have lacked any sense of participatory democracy for a long while, and chains are a sure way to foster disempowerment in work and in urban life.

Can planners and architects recreate vibrant high street social spaces? Maybe. But what’s needed isn’t an architecture of elitist celebration or bland conformism, but an architecture that creates the conditions for innovative action to occur – action that connects ordinary people, that hooks people up together and helps install new imaginative sorts of urban spaces. Our retreat to online shopping is merely a symptom of high street alienation.

Yet it isn’t hi-tech urban design that’s at stake; more low-budget city acupuncture, of finding new ways to recreate old stuff, of poking into things meticulously and lovingly to enable sociability – not rolling in roughshod with the bulldozer or with a new Tesco superstore.

Britain’s high streets can thrive again – if we look past shops | Andrew Carter

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Some people call this weak architecture: it’s the opposite of designing and constructing immense buildings. It’s about nurturing activities in between strong buildings. It’s more about nurturing street space, developing floor space, re-energising vacant units and dormant high streets, subverting what’s within those spectacular projects. It’s about shaking up the very foundations upon which strong buildings are built. That’s weak architecture’s strength.

The essential thing is to construct a human space in which experiential communication can be most effectively transmitted. Physicality morphs into sociality. The more we stay passive objects along a supermarket aisle, the less we actively participate in the production of our own life. Then, things get done to us rather than by us. Our own ability to realise ourselves, to affirm ourselves, is stunted.

We’re talking about a new value system for our cites and small towns; it’s nothing official, not as yet, but a sovereignty constituted by a going back to the future, back in the sense that the building block for this empowerment is the ancient ideal of a citadin, a person belonging to the city, a citizen belonging to la cité, like the surrealists said – after drinking a lot of coffee.